Like bees in the garden of spirit, we are designed to gather nectar from all the world’s spiritual traditions and allow it to become rich honey with which to sustain ourselves and feed the hungry world. We are also endowed with the wisdom to recognize the nourishment and pass over the noxious weeds.
When we encounter different faiths, our task is to excavate and sift to find the jewels that lie at the heart of each tradition. Every religion contains a treasure trove of wisdom teachings and transformational practices, and each one is also burdened with divisive messages and a history of violence and oppression. The inter-spiritual seeker dares to dive down and lift up the teachings of love, and refuse to drink the poison.
The emerging inter-spiritual movement does not insist that all the world’s religions are the same. Rather, it affirms that all the world’s religions recognize and proclaim that all beings are one. It is in this sense that the inter-spiritual path is unifying.
The goal of the inter-spiritual life is to move beyond inter-religious dialog and into a direct experience of the sacred in multiple traditions—an encounter that, by its very nature, dissolves historical boundaries and calls all beings into our essential interconnected state. By cultivating radical spiritual nakedness, we transcend theology and enter the mystery, where we may be transformed by love.
In this session, we will follow the streams of mystical longing and social justice that emanate from and return to the heart of the world’s religious traditions. Through readings from the ecstatic poetry of the mystics, sitting in contemplative silence, chanting the names of God in an array of languages, and engaging in deep dialog, we build community and invigorate our inter-spiritual quest, so that we may live in deeper peace and be of greater service to all beings.
